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August/September Entry: Genericland

Somewhere in the vast land that is the tutorials part of these forums, I decided to use the provided map as the base for my next learning project, which is combining some techniques presented in different tutorials. Again, a HUGE thanks to all who are making them!!

I went for a simple regional "map of some generic land" approach, trying to learn how to do some basic rivers, forests, mountains and whatnot.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

I agree with Ascension! The colors are vivid and alluring. I am going to guess that you're going to need a little more than nice looking continents to win the challenge though, so I can't wait to see what you fill the continents up with.

Next step was to fill the empty lands with mountains, forests etc. I had some difficulties with some of the tutorial methods that involve difference clouding a layer and use that as the base mountains and valleys, I could not get them in the right place, and it always looked ugly when I tried to move them. Also I found that they distorted the colors of the underlying layers, and I could not find a workaround for this.

After many unsuccessful tries I decided to paint the terrain manually.This way I could preserve the original colors and I could get the mountains where I wanted them to be. Took a while longer than the "semi-automatic" methods though.

With the mountains in place, I had to rethink the coloring of the map. I hope I didn't screw this up, since I got some positive remarks about the original coloring. I kinda like it though so it cant be all bad.

Yeah this looks really pretty. How did yours get to zoom in, the image we got originally barely zoomed at all? What's the deal?

“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden

Not sure I follow you, but if you mean the original black/white contest map, i just did an image size change in PS to increase the size to 2400 x 2400 pixels, keeping the resampling to "nearest neighbor" to make sure there would not be any grey areas between the black and the white. Then I had to fix the edges so they did not look so "blocky".

Hope I didn't break the rules, they just said to use the "shape", which I did

I don't know about the rules but I wondered about the same thing. It seems small the way it is. I like the bigger zoom you have going on. That said, I assumed it had to remain the same size but now I'm thinking it doesn't have to. I dunno.

“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden

You can make it any size you want. Krolac did the the very first thing that I would have done - make it bigger - then tweak it a little bit and go at it.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)